And what’s up with this Small Talk standard?

Depending on your CX Strategy, your Corporate Strategy and your Customer Service Strategy, it may make perfect sense to implement a ‘Small Talk’ behaviour into your Agent set of quality standards.

Typically I see Small Talk expressed as “Have you had your lunch yet sir?” or “How’s the weather in Singapore today?”

An unrelated question added into the conversation with the intention to build rapport.

I’m not disparaging the standard.

If your organization went through the full and proper process of selecting and defining relevant standards and Small Talk presented itself – then by all means implement it.

But the Agents I meet tell me that the Small Talk standard was literally grafted on to their existing set of standards. They felt they were being asked to do a funny thing.

When done right – appropriate small talk can elevate a conversation.

But when used at the wrong time, or in the wrong way – it sounds at best inauthentic and at worst – irritating.

Making it a compliance behaviour is almost guaranteed to be problematic.

At the end of the day you can’t capture the entirety of the Customer Experience in a single interaction

It’s well understood that the Customer Experience consists of the Customer’s perceptions across their entire experience with an organization.

And that sometimes that experience doesn’t even touch ‘Customer Service’ or the Contact Centre.

Of course, when it does touch Customer Service or the Contact Centre that interaction may have more emotional resonance than other types of interactions.

And that matters.

The management decisions described in this short article were not made by one individual. A group or committee of smart people sat around a table, decided that these were good ideas and implemented them.

But grafting on Agent behaviours in the hope they deliver a positive Customer Experience shouldn’t involve Agents saying funny things.